Coffee Talk Sideshow

As I’ve already mentioned before, we have far too many meetings on a daily basis here at Bill and Dave’s company. One of the methods upper management types like to use for communicating company propaganda is called a Coffee Talk. Generally a Coffee Talk is an hour long corporate spin session. To bait us into attending these gigs management usually serves up cookies and really shitty gas station coffee. When I first started working here I went to Coffee Talks because I was lead to believe it was mandatory to attend them.

I noticed a few trends about the corporate talking heads after my first year or so on the job. One, they never talked about anything that directly related to my job. It was all too general and vague. Two, when a manager told us about a new direction they were taking our business in or a decision that was going to be implemented company-wide, by the time anything happened many months later their story might have changed more than a half dozen times. The final outcome was almost always radically different from the bullshit they fed us in Coffee Talks. So I decided upper managers have close to zero credibility and I stopped going to their meetings. Cafeteria cookies and substandard coffee isn’t enough to get me to listen to their crap anymore. Many of our employees flock to Coffee Talks though. Some of them are genuinely gullible so they swallow just about everything that eminates from the mouth of management. Others go there just for the free grub and a paid hour long nap. Coffee Talks are real snoozers.

We had a big turnout last week for a lady from corporate HQ that held a Coffee Talk on site. I never heard of the woman before so it didn’t matter to me one bit what the hell she was going to yap about. A few minutes after she stepped up to the podium and began to spew forth with company propaganda at a couple hundred employees, I snuck into the back of the auditorium from the hallway and rifled through their baskets of cookies. My plan was just to grab a couple handfuls of oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies, then head back to the instrument line and munch out. While I was in cookie scavenger mode I spotted Unabomber. He got up from a seat in the audience and walked over to the side of the stage. I got a feeling he was about to do something very, very stupid. So I stuck around and observed.

Unabomber began to motion with his arms at the speaker in an attempt to get her attention. When she saw the jerk she left the microphone and walked over towards his side of the stage. That’s when he unloaded on her with both barrels blazing. Unabomber was yelling at her, almost shouting. She received his opinions concerning how messed up the company is, what he thought they should do to change, how much he hated his job, and it went on and on from there. It was kinda funny. If it had been me he was yelling at I would have called security and had his stupid ass hauled off the premises right then and there. Instead, the woman looked confused and took the beating. What a little trooper. I walked out snickering to myself with a pile of cookies in my hands.

I heard later on the manager lady Unabomber hassled thought the reason he was trying to get her attention was because of a family emergency or something. I guess that’s why she had such a perplexed expression on her face when Unabomber began his mentally ill tirade. She got his name from our department manager, apparently. So she knows who he is now but I seriously doubt anyone is going to do anything to him. Like hand him a written reprimand or sit him down for a serious heart to heart talk. It’s so strange working here in this environment. You can get away with just about anything and not have to worry about losing your job. For me, watching all this mayhem happen around me is like working in the Twilight Zone.